Andrew Solomon, on undergoing a tribal cure for depression in Senegal: "So there I was, naked, totally covered in blood, and they said, 'Okay, that's the end of this part of it. The next piece comes now.' And I said, 'okay,' and we went back over to the area where we had done the morning preparations. And one of them said, 'Look, it's lunchtime. Why don't we just take a break for a minute? Would you like a Coke?'"

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Bar Rescue's Jon Taffer, on coping with impossible people: "Nobody has ever swung at me. I've been pushed, but I've never been hit. I am a bit intimidating, but the real trick to not getting swung at—and this is thirty years of bar experience speaking—is you stand so close to the guy that he doesn't have the room to swing. He can't wind up!"

Celebrity chef Kerry Simon, on loss: "Cooking in Vegas is its own experience. My first night at Prime, there was a guy who lost $18,000 in one hand, and he wanted a steak brought up to his room. They asked me if I would cook one to go. I said, 'Sure. You lose $18,000, you get the rib eye.' A guy drops that kind of money in less than a minute, you do everything you can to lift his spirits."

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Chris Jones, on a brilliant new book Trapped Under the Sea, by Neil Swidey: "Audacious, brilliant, imaginative construction projects are really, really hard to build—and ultimately they're built not by the dreamers who conceived them, but by the sandhogs and divers sent deep into the earth, trusting that the people above them have done their job to perfection. Their trust is not always well placed."

And Mike Sager, on a distant relative he discovered—a successful real estate maven with dwarfism—while preparing to interview Peter Dinklage: "Cousin Mace had an unusual hobby. There are several albums of yellowed photographs, apparently taken by accomplices: Mace with Joe DiMaggio. Mace with Muhammad Ali. Mace with Richard Nixon, Jonas Salk, Sammy Davis Jr., Edward G. Robinson, Jane Russell, Danny Kaye, George Gobel, Milton Berle, Jackie Mason, Tom Jones. Most of the photos were taken in New York or nearby cities. In all of them, the celebs appear somewhat dazed. Clearly they'd been ambushed. Their expressions seem to say: 'How could I possibly refuse?'"

Plus: The Esquire Weekly Box of Permanent Joy (after a week of bad news), charting the emotional roller coaster that is Beck's career, G. Love on Paul Simon, and much more.

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